Chapter 3

Louis Taranto sat on his heels against the baked clay wall of the cell, watching the sweat run down the face of his companion. Though he privately considered Harvey Meyers a very weak link, he had so far restrained himself from hinting as much. They were in this hole together, and he might well need the blubbery loudmouth’s help to get out--if there were any way to get out.

Meyers sat on the single bench with which their jailers had provided them, staring mournfully at the rude table upon which he rested his elbows. He was unusually quiet, as if the heat had drained him of all anxiety.

Sloppy bum! thought Taranto. He could at least comb his hair!

They were allowed occasional access to toilet articles which the Syssokans had obtained from the one Terran officially in residence on the planet. Taranto had shaved the day before, but the other had not bothered for more than a week. Meyers was perhaps an inch short of six feet and must weigh two hundred pounds Terran. He had a loose mouth between pudgy cheeks. His little blue eyes seemed always to be prying except during periods such as the present when he was feeling sorry for himself. He had been a medic in the same spaceship in which Taranto had been a ventilation mechanic.

“Glad I was never sick,” Taranto muttered to himself.

Meyers looked up.

“Huh?”

“I said I’m glad I was never sick,” repeated Taranto deliberately, thinking, Let him figure that out if he can!

“This heat’s enough to make anybody sick,” complained Meyers. “Why do they have to keep us up on the top floor of the tower, anyway?”

“You expect a luxury suite in the cellar? What kind of jail were you ever in where the prisoners got the best?”

“Who says I was ever in jail?” demanded Meyers defensively.

Taranto grinned slightly, but made no reply. After a moment, the other returned to his study of the table. He breathed in loudly, his shoulders heaving as if he had been running. To avoid the sight, Taranto let his eyes wander for the thousandth time around the walls of the square cell.

The large blocks of baked clay were turning from dun to gray in the twilight seeping through the four small window openings. Overhead, they curved together to form a high arch that was the peak of the tower. Besides table and bench, the room contained a clay water jug a yard high, a wooden bucket, a battered copper cooking pot, and a pile of coarse straw upon which lay the two gray shirts the spacers had discarded in the heat. In the center of the floor was a wooden trap door which Taranto eyed speculatively.

He reminded himself that he must suppress his longing to smash the next Syssokan head that appeared in the opening.

“It’s getting near time,” he remarked after a few minutes.

Meyers peered at the patches of sky revealed by the windows. They were losing the glare of Syssokan daylight. There had been a wisp or two of cloud earlier, but these had either blown over or faded into the deepening gray of the sky.

“Listen at the door!” ordered Taranto, impatient at having to remind the other.

He rose, wiped perspiration from his face with the palms of both hands, and rubbed them in turn on the thighs of his gray pants. He was inches shorter than Meyers, and twenty pounds or more lighter, but his bare shoulders bulged powerfully. A little fat softened the lines of his belly without concealing the existence of an underlying layer of solid muscle. He moved with a heavy, padding gait, like a large carnivore whose natural grace is revealed only at top speed.

Meyers watched him resentfully.

Why couldn’t I have made it to one of the other emergency rockets? he asked himself. Imagine a bunch of crazy savages that say even landing here is a crime!

He supposed that Taranto would have pointed to the sizable city where they were held if he had heard the Syssokans called savages. Meyers thought the trouble with Taranto was that he was too physical, too much of a dumb flunky who spoiled Meyers’ efforts to talk them out of trouble.

I had a better break coming, he thought.

He wished he had been in a rocket with one of the ship’s officers who might have known about Syssoka. They would have gone into an orbit about the planet’s star and put out a call for help to the nearest Terran base or ship. As it was, they might be given up for lost even if the other rockets were picked up. The course they had been on before the explosion had been designed to pass this system by a good margin.

Taranto, he recalled, had thought them lucky to have picked up the planet on the little escape ship’s instruments. Taranto, decided Meyers, thought he was a hot pilot because he had been a few years in space. He had not looked so good bending the rocket across that ridge of rock out in the desert. They should have taken a chance on coming down in the city here.

They had just about straightened themselves out after that landing when they had seen the party of Syssokans on the way. It had not taken them long to reach the wreck. They could even speak Terran, and no pidgin-Terran either. Then it turned out that they did not like spacers of any race landing without permission. There had been a war with the next star system; and the laws now said there should be only one alien of any race permitted to reside on Syssoka except for brief visits by licensed spaceships.

“What’s the matter with our government?” muttered Meyers.

“What?” asked Taranto, turning from one of the windows.

“I said what’s the matter with the Terran Government? Why don’t they pitch a couple of bombs down here, an’ show these skinny nuts who’s running the galaxy? Who are they to call us aliens?”

Taranto turned again to the eighteen inch square window, set like the other three in the center of its wall at the level of his shoulders.

“They’re posting their sentries on the city wall for the night,” he told Meyers. “The thing should be flying in here any time now.”

“If it comes,” said Meyers grumpily. “Something will go wrong with that too.”

The other spat out the window that faced the main part of the Syssokan city, then padded to the one opposite. Strange patterns of stars gleamed already in the sky over the desert. The air that blew against his damp face was a trifle cooler.

Should I tell the slob about that? he wondered. Naw--he’d try to breathe it all! Let him sweat, as long as he listens for the Syssokans!

Meyers had left his bench to crouch over the trap door. There was no reason to expect their jailers, but the Syssokans had a habit of popping up at odd times. The evening meal was usually brought well after dark, however.

“Do you think it will really get here again?” asked Meyers. “What if they spot it?”

Taranto grunted. He was watching something he thought was one of the flying insects that thickened the Syssokan twilight. Seconds later, he ducked away from the window as a pencil-sized thing with two pairs of flailing wings darted through the opening.

It whirled about the dim cell. Meyers flapped his hands about his head. The third time around, the insect passed within Taranto’s reach; and he batted it out of the air with a feline sweep of his left hand. It fell against the base of the wall and twitched for a few minutes.

Meyers squinted at him, examining the slightly flattened nose and the meaty cheeks that gave Taranto a deceptively plump look.

“You’re quick, all right,” he admitted. “They used to say in the ship that you were a boxer. What made you a spacer?”

“Too short,” said Taranto laconically. “Five-eight, an’ I grew into a light-heavy.”

“What did that have to do with it?”

“I did all right for a while. When I could get in on them, they’d go down an’ stay down. Then they learned to stick an’ run on me. It was either grow a longer arm or quit.”

“Maybe you should have quit sooner,” said Meyers, for no good reason except that he resented Taranto and blamed him for their predicament.

“Why should I?” asked Taranto, with a cold stare. “It was good money. Even after having my eyebrows fixed, I got a nice nest-egg back on Terra. Nothing really shows on me except the habit of a short haircut.”

Meyers ran his fingers through his own unkempt hair.

“What was that for?” he asked.

“Oh ... it don’t wave in the air so much when you stop a jab. Looks better, to the judges.”

Meyers grunted. He’d like to believe it doesn’t show on him! he thought.

Suddenly, he bent down to place an ear against the trap door. A petulant grimace twisted his features.

“They’re on the ladder,” he whispered. “Wouldn’t you know?”

He straightened up and walked softly back to his bench. Taranto remained at the window. It was a perfectly natural place for him to be, he decided.

A few moments later, the trap door creaked up, letting yellow light burst into the cell. It came from a clumsy electric lantern in the grip of the first Syssokan who climbed into the chamber. Two others followed, suggestively fingering pistols that would have been considered crude on Terra two centuries earlier.